Littered with garbage, the stinking network of 17 nullahs are free of human occupation in a city otherwise struggling to deal with the rampant encroachment of public streets.

An expert in urban planning and the head of a private architecture and design firm, Rastogi envisages turning those tracts into landscaped passages for New Delhi's pedestrians, cyclists and solar-powered rickshaws.

"The city will then be interconnected with an eco-friendly and safe transport network," he said.

"They walk in extremely unsafe and hostile conditions, in constant conflict with motorized traffic and are easy victims to crashes and accidents," CSE said in a report last year.

Pedestrians in New Delhi, it added, accounted for 47 percent of road accident deaths.

"All the ills of urban development exist in this one city," Rastogi said, noting New Delhi's gridlocked roads, rapidly increasing population and high levels of pollution.

Figures posted on the Delhi government Web site show that the city received 233,000 migrants from other states -- apparently in search of work -- in 2006, a number higher than the population growth that took place naturally that year here.

Spread over about 1,500 square kilometers, New Delhi is home to about 17 million people.

The 40-year-old, London-educated architect seems confident that he can ease some of the city's burden.

But what Rastogi is seeking for his proposed answer to New Delhi's problems is cooperation from a complex bureaucracy.

"The main challenge of a project like this surprisingly is not funding, it's not technology either. The main problem that a project like this faces is a multiplicity of agencies and the fact that our city has no CEO, the fact that there is no one person accountable for the city of Delhi," he said.